We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
HER ALIBI (1989)
Like Runaway and 3 Men and a Baby, the 1989 comedy Her Alibi is another Tom Selleck-starring movie I saw a whole lot of when I was a kid, as there was a period of time where it seemed to be on cable quite often – and I would watch it any time I came across it, because I enjoyed it and found it to be amusing.
Directed by Bruce Beresford from a screenplay by Charlie Peters, this one casts Selleck in the role of Phil Blackwood, the author of a series of mystery thriller novels that center on a character named Peter Swift. Going through a dry spell since his relationship broke up and four years behind on his latest novel, Phil decides to give his imagination a boost by doing something crazy: when he sees that an attractive Romanian immigrant named Nina (played by model Paulina Porizkova, who had a lengthy relationship with Ric Ocasek of The Cars) has been arrested for stabbing a man to death with a pair of scissors, he finds it hard to believe that she could be a killer, so he steps up and gives her an alibi. She couldn’t have been at the murder scene because she was with him; they’re having an affair. With her alibi in place, the police send Nina home with Phil.
Phil lets Nina stay at his place and starts writing a new novel, imagining his interactions with Nina have a romantic edge to them, replacing himself in the situation with the muscular and heroic Peter Swift. But while he’s getting his writing groove back, he’s also wavering on whether or not Nina is truly innocent, and actually fears for his life most of the time. This leads to a series of humorous moments where Nina may or may not be trying to kill Phil, and neither he nor the viewer is fully certain what the truth is.
Whether Nina is a killer or not, Phil does take a beating as the movie going on, sustaining several injuries due to multiple different mishaps. Like when his house explodes.
Her Alibi’s box office barely matched its budget and the critical reception was dismal... but those are things I was completely unaware of when I was watching it on cable back in the day. I didn’t know this was supposedly a bad movie or a failure, I just watched it because it was on TV (again and again) and enjoyed it every time.
Revisiting the film after some decades, I still found Her Alibi to be much more enjoyable than the critical response would lead you to believe. It’s an entertaining comedy, Selleck does a great job in the lead role, and Porizkova also did fine work with the material she was given. I’ve watched it many times before, and I’ll definitely watch it again someday.
SALEM’S LOT (2024)
Stephen King’s novel Salem’s Lot is, like a lot of King’s works, a bit of an epic, as the story - which came to King as the thought, “What if Dracula came to Maine?” - shows how a vampire outbreak gradually destroys a small town. Something like that takes a lot of pages to play out, and if you’re going to bring it to the screen for an adaptation, it’s going to need a substantial running time. This is why Salem’s Lot has previously been adapted as two separate three hour miniseries. We got one (which I like), directed by Tobe Hooper, in 1979, and then another one (which I’m not a fan of), directed by Mikael Salomon, in 2004. Now we have another Salem’s Lot adaptation, and this time around writer/director Gary Dauberman took on the challenge of trying to condense the events of the novel into a 113 minute feature film.
Dauberman’s film sticks to the basics of the concept. Author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman, who I have been rooting for ever since meeting him on the set of The Strangers: Prey at Night back in 2017) has a childhood connection to the town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine and goes back there to start putting together a book on the local ghost story, which is connected to the creepy old Marsten House that stands on a hill overlooking the town. Ben is hoping to stay in the Marsten House, where terrible things once happened, but when he arrives in ‘Salem’s Lot he finds that the place is already occupied by new residents: antiques dealer Straker (Pilou Asbæk) and his mysterious associate Barlow.
While Ben is doing research and falling for local girl Susan Norton (Makenzie Leigh), strange things start happening in Salem’s Lot. Residents of various ages start dying or getting seriously ill. Soon enough, we come to find out that Barlow is a vampire, the Dracula stand-in in this story, and he’s tearing Salem’s Lot down one infectious bite at a time. It’s up to Ben, Susan, teacher Matthew Burke (Bill Camp), young horror fan Mark Petrie (Jordan Preston Carter), Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard), and troubled priest Father Callahan (John Benjamin Hickey) to try to bring this outbreak of vampirism to an end.
Being a shortened take on the material, this Salem’s Lot moves through the character scenes at warp speed, so it’s difficult for it to stir up any sort of connection with the characters, even with actors doing fine work in their roles. Dauberman has to get through this stuff fast so he can spend more time on the vampire set pieces – and he did manage to work some pretty cool vampire stuff into his movie. Some of it is familiar from previous versions of Salem’s Lot and some of it is unique to this version, including a sequence that’s set at a drive-in... which is a fun setting, but the sequence itself doesn’t make much sense. Somehow the vampires of the town have decided that the safest way to get through the day is not to just climb into any random dark, shadowed space, but instead drive over to the drive-in parking lot and spend the day in the trunks of their vehicles. This proves to be very unwise.
In some ways, this feels like a “greatest hits” of Salem’s Lot, keeping the stuff people are known to like about the story and having as little filler between those moments as possible. It even lifts a hit from the Hooper miniseries with the appearance of Barlow, who looked like a regular person in King’s story and the 2004 miniseries. Hooper turned him into a Nosferatu type, and Dauberman carried that over into his movie, where Barlow (Alexander Ward) looks like Nosferatu with some 30 Days of Night inspiration mixed in.
Salem’s Lot (2024) is fine, but ended up feeling underwhelming to me overall. If given a choice, I’d certainly watch this again before I’d watch the 2004 miniseries, but in the end I feel like the Tobe Hooper miniseries is really the only Salem’s Lot adaptation that I’ll need to watch again someday.
DEXTER SEASON SEVEN (2012)
The Showtime series Dexter racked up a lot of Emmy nominations over the course of its eight season initial run. Michael C. Hall, who played the title character, was nominated in the Outstanding Lead Actor category five times. Jimmy Smits was nominated as Outstanding Guest Actor for his performance as Miguel Prado in season 3, Julia Stiles was nominated for her performance as Lumen Pierce in season 5, and John Lithgow won the Outstanding Guest Actor award for playing Arthur Mitchell, the Trinity Killer, in season 4. The show won title design and editing awards, Steve Shill got the Outstanding Directing award for his work on the season 4 finale. But the shocking thing to realize, when looking over the list of the show’s Emmy nominations and wins, is that Jennifer Carpenter never received a nomination for her performance as Debra Morgan, Dexter’s adoptive sister. Carpenter did some incredible work handling some very dramatic moments on this show, and it’s a shame she never received Emmy recognition for that.
Season 7 is a particularly heavy season for Carpenter, as Debra – a dedicated policewoman who has worked her way up to a Lieutenant position in the homicide division at the Miami Metro Police Department – discovers that her adoptive brother, Dexter, who also works at Miami Metro as a blood spatter analyst, is a serial killer. In fact, he’s the Bay Harbor Butcher that Miami Metro was on the trail of several seasons ago, before the late Sergeant James Doakes took the blame for the murders. Debra was going to tell Dexter that she’s in love with him, but instead she finds him standing over the corpse of his latest victim. And she has to spend the season trying to come to terms with the fact that her brother is a murderer... and that she’s not going to turn him in. It helps that Dexter doesn’t direct his homicidal urges toward innocent people, but toward the deserving: murderers who don’t live by this code of not harming the innocent. But this is still a difficult thing for Debra to deal with, and another mind-boggling fact being that her own father, himself a cop, knew Dexter was a killer and gave him this code to abide by. (James Remar appears throughout the series as Harry Morgan, who is long dead, but Dexter still imagines that they can talk to each other.)
While Debra is coming to terms with the reality of who he is, Dexter continues killing people, with one of his targets being Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski), who got caught up with a homicidal boyfriend when she was a teenager and has killed some people herself over the years. Problem is, Dexter is so attracted to Hannah that he ends up having sex with her instead of killing her. And even though being in a relationship with her is dangerous because she tends to poison people, he tries to make it work. Which isn’t a great move for him, because she soon has him questioning things he has always believed about himself and his homicidal urges, and even gets him to doubt whether or not he should follow his code. Honestly, I did not like the Hannah character at all, and found Dexter’s whole deal with her, and the doubting of his code, to be rather irritating.
Clyde Phillips was the showrunner of Dexter for the first four seasons and did a great job. Chip Johannessen took over for season 5, and I felt he did a fine job as well. Then Scott Buck took over for season 6... and there started to be an increasing number of questionable moments and scenes where Dexter acts out of character. That carries over into season 7. Dexter continues to act out of character at times, and there are some highly questionable scenes – like the one where Dexter sedates a cop killer in the Miami airport and decides to kill the guy right there in the airport, in a baggage area! It’s ridiculous. But it’s an important moment because the victim turns out to be part of a Ukrainian crime syndicate and the head of that syndicate, Ray Stevenson as Isaak Sirko, comes after Dexter on a mission of vengeance. The syndicate also runs a strip club in Miami, which leads to a subplot for my least favorite character on the show, Desmond Harrington as Joey Quinn, another person from the Miami Metro homicide division. Quinn gets involved with a stripper and uses up screen time that could have been spent on more interesting characters, whether that be Dexter or Debra or other characters from Miami Metro, like C.S. Lee as forensic science investigator Vince Masuka or David Zayas as one of my favorite characters, Sergeant Angel Batista – who, in this season, is pondering retirement.
Debra knows that Dexter is the Bay Harbor Butcher, and another character who starts to strongly suspect that he is a killer is Captain María LaGuerta (Lauren Vélez), who was close to Doakes and has always been an intriguingly flawed, overly ambitious and determined character. LaGuerta spends the season digging deeper into the Bay Harbor Butcher case, and during her investigation she draws in former Captain, Tom Matthews (Geoff Pierson), who LaGuerta betrayed and blackmailed to get her promotions. Matthews is a welcome presence here, as Pierson gets to deliver some really funny lines.
I enjoyed Dexter season 7 overall, but it’s a mixed bag, with moments I felt shouldn’t have been in there and characters I didn’t enjoy watching. But it has some great moments as well, and Jennifer Carpenter should have gotten an Emmy nomination.
SNIPER: ROGUE MISSION (2022)
Sometimes you can find unplanned trilogies within larger franchises. Of course, the Star Wars film franchise has (up to this point) been composed of a series of trilogies, some of them more planned out than others, but I’m talking about things like the “Tommy Jarvis trilogy” that exists within the Friday the 13th franchise and the “Thorn trilogy” in the Halloween franchise. As it turns out, there’s a trilogy within the Sniper action movie franchise as well. The Oliver Thompson trilogy. Thompson wrote the script for the eighth Sniper movie, Sniper: Assassin's End, which was directed by Kaare Andrews. Then he was given the chance to both write and direct the next two sequels, creating the Oliver Thompson trilogy.
Given how the middle chapter in this trilogy, Sniper: Rogue Mission, turned out, I’m kind of surprised that Thompson was able to make the trilogy. From what I can see online, this was the most poorly received entry in the franchise to date. Watching it, I can completely understand why.
The story Thompson crafted for this one finds that Brandon Beckett (Chad Michael Collins), the Marine Corps sniper at the heart of the last several films (and the son of Marine Corps sniper Thomas Beckett, the lead in the first three films), has left sniping behind to join the CIA. This is his way of settling down. His superior, Gabriel Stone – played by Dennis Haysbert, who was credited as the Colonel in Sniper: Legacy and Sniper: Ghost Shooter – is planning to retire, but he’s hanging around just long enough to make sure Brandon has a smooth transition into being a CIA agent. But Brandon doesn’t. When he gets on the bad side of Harvey Cusamano (Paul Essiembre), the Deputy Chief of U.S. Border Patrol, while investigating a sex trafficking ring, Brandon is fired from the CIA after just three months.
Brandon was collaborating with Zeke Rosenberg of Homeland Security, a.k.a. Agent Zero (Ryan Robbins), a character who was introduced in Sniper: Assassin’s End, on the sex trafficking investigation – and since Zero is still on the case, Brandon joins up with him to see the job through in an unofficial capacity. Knowing the law is closing in, members of the ring massacre a whole group of women they had forced into becoming cam girls – but one of the tech nerds is able to save the life of Mary Jane (Jocelyn Hudon). With members of the ring still out to kill Mary Jane, Brandon and Zero take her into their protective custody, and also enlist the help of another tech nerd, Josh Brener as Intelligence Pete, and assassin Lady Death (Sayaka Akimoto), another character that made their first appearance in Assassin’s End.
The way Rogue Mission plays out is just not very interesting, and it’s not very exciting, either. All of the Sniper sequels have been lower budgeted, direct-to-video projects, but the budgetary limitations were never as obvious as they are in this sequel, which is rather uneventful, pits our heroes against a bunch of nobody dweebs, and largely takes place in very bland locations... on the occasions when the characters aren’t just chatting in various rooms. The only things that really stand out about Rogue Mission is the score, which was composed by Thompson himself, and the fact that the tone of the movie leans more toward comedy than any of the other films in the series. Two of the primary bad guys are a pair of bickering brothers (Brendan Sexton III and David MacInnis), and there are some goofy approaches to the material here and there.
For example, Brandon is very interested to find out how Lady Death is still around after she was supposed to be sent off to Japan at the end of Assassin’s End. Lady Death tells him – but instead of giving the audience the information, Thompson cuts away to Intelligence Pete telling Mary Jane about his jigsaw puzzle podcast and the accompanying app while Lady Death acts out her story for Brandon in the background. After we’ve heard I.P. drone on about his puzzle stuff, Brandon exclaims that Lady Death’s story was “the greatest story I’ve ever heard” – but we didn’t hear a word of it.
I’m a fan of the Sniper franchise and found this entry to be a disappointment. But Sony appears to have been satisfied, because they brought Thompson back for the next sequel, which is teased at the end of this one. Hopefully it’s a step up.
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